Read Online Tropical Depression by Jeff Lindsay - Free Book Online

expression. I crossed US 1 and, on an impulse, rode by the Blue Marlin motel. It was a small, clean motel with refrigerators in the rooms and in summer months it had the lowest prices. It was just the sort of place a cop might stay. I didn’t see a metallic blue car in the lot, but that might not mean anything.
    I dropped my bicycle in the breezeway outside the office and went in. The night clerk was a guy of about fifty. He was balding but he had carefully brushed the side hair over the bald spot and given it a dye job. It looked like the sofa in a disco lounge. He looked at me over the top of a copy of The Advocate. “Help you?” he asked dubiously.
    “What room is Roscoe McAuley in, please?” I gave him my best business smile and let him look me over carefully for signs of a concealed nuclear weapon. He finally decided I might not be a terrorist, sighed heavily, and flipped open a book. “How is that spelled?” I gave it to him and he scanned the book for a moment, flipping a few pages and following his index finger down the columns on four pages before asking, “When did you say he registered?”
    “Today. Maybe yesterday.” And maybe not at all, I thought.
    “We have no McAuley registered,” he said in a very final tone of voice, and lifted his newspaper again.
    I thought about saying thanks, but it seemed like a waste of breath. Besides, I didn’t want to shatter his image of the rest of the world. I walked out of the little office and picked up my bicycle.
    And then I was stuck, because I didn’t know where to point it. I could keep trying the hotels. I could go home and call around to the two or three dozen other hotels where Roscoe might be, and they might or might not tell me if he was there.
    But what it came down to was that I didn’t know where to start looking for Roscoe, and wasn’t sure why I should or what to say if I found him. I suddenly felt like a thirty-year-old man sitting on a bicycle in the dark. Maybe it was a good thing I never made Detective.
    I pedaled home.
    After the bright light of the sunset at Mallory, the night seemed dark and quiet. It was a warm night and the feel of it on my skin was soft. It made me edgy. I went past the rows of houses. Most of them had one small light by the front door, usually yellow, and a purple glow inside from the television. This was another sure sign I was in a resident’s neighborhood; only people who lived here watched TV.
    The streets here in the residential area were dark and nearly deserted. Most of the people who lived here year-round knew better than to go out after dark. For one thing, you might run into some drunken optician from Wisconsin who wanted nothing more than to follow you home and drink you dry and then throw up on your couch. For another, our island paradise had been catching up with the rest of the world, and over the last few years crack had come to Key West. That meant that the number of burglaries, robberies, and muggings were doubling every six months. Unless you stayed on Duval Street you ran the risk of becoming a statistic.
    In fact, as I turned in at the corner of my street, I thought I saw a figure slip over the wall around my house. I wasn’t positive, but I wasn’t taking any chances, either; not when I might otherwise stumble over somebody who would gladly remove my liver with his bare hands if he could get over half a dollar for it, fast.
    With the thought of a little bit of action I felt alive again. The sour taste was gone from the back of my throat and I could feel the blood pounding through my veins.
    I took a deep, steadying breath and slipped off my bicycle. I put it quietly on the grass alongside the road and moved into the shadow of a huge oleander that grew up from the corner of my coral rock wall. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darker yard. Then I moved across the wall as quietly as I could, slinking to the cover of my key lime tree.
    From the lime tree I could see the side and back of the